


A Truth I Would Rather Lose

by vials



Category: A Perfect Spy - John le Carré
Genre: (if you haven't read it please read it), I'm not even sure what this is tbh, M/M, and a bit spoilery if by some twist of fate you're here and haven't read the book, and it's also kind of character-studyish, it's a prompt fill and it's angsty, literally what am I doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8718907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: From the moment they met, Axel knew Magnus would be the one truth he couldn't bury.





	

Axel had a poet’s eye for things, and that was why when he first set eyes on a stranger all those years ago in Bern, he was completely unsurprised to find himself secure in the knowledge that there was never going to be a person like this one. If he allowed himself to give in to the full amount of melodramatics, he doubted there had been anyone before Magnus, either – he was of the opinion that people like him didn’t come along very often, and that there was usually only room in the world for one of them at a time. 

He wrote a lot more then, back in the days where he was able to fool himself that it might be safe again. He had never given up writing, of course, but there was something suffocating about having to censor one’s self, about having to hide pages as soon as they were done and having to look over one’s shoulder just to read over them again. He couldn’t remember a time in his life where he wrote more freely than he had in Bern; sometimes he thought he would give just about anything to read those pages again, but of course they were gone from him, too. Axel was no stranger to having things taken from him, and most of the memories had settled into a resigned sadness somewhere deep inside him where it could be easily ignored. That writing was one of the rare exceptions. 

“Do you sleep?” Magnus had asked him once, comfortably spread across Axel’s bed, because Axel rarely used it these days. He was where he could always be found; hunched over a typewriter at that old desk, but he spared Magnus enough time to turn in his seat and look at him as though he thought he was an idiot.

“Of course I sleep,” he said, and Magnus smiled, teasing, like he didn’t quite believe him. “And what about you?” Axel asked, never able to resist rising to the look. “Do you always have to interrupt a comfortable silence, or is it something you reserve specially for me?”

“I feel like I have to interrupt you sometimes,” Magnus told him, sitting up and pushing himself back against the wall. “You think so loudly I’m worried I might hear something.”

Axel wasn’t sure what it was about that moment, and he would devote several hundred thousand words over the next few years to trying to work it out. All he knew was that he knew, and that he felt compelled to say something even if he didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation, and that he hadn’t felt like this in a very long time, if at all. In later years he would equate it to a childlike realisation, but of what he could never find words for, either. Learning something, maybe – something that had until that moment been completely incomprehensible simply because he hadn’t been aware it could exist.

The words had slipped from him in a semi-conscious haze and sounded odd on his tongue at first. It had been some time since he had spoken Czech, finding no need for it here, but at that moment Axel was glad for his sudden reversion to his mother tongue. He didn’t know what would have happened had Magnus understood him, and in later years he drove himself mad wondering if Magnus remembered what he had said, if he understood now. 

“ _Miluju tě_ ,” he said, quietly, surprising himself on several levels, and he knew Magnus had heard but he said nothing. They looked at one another for a moment; Magnus smiled, and Axel returned to his work.

Axel regarded himself as something of a philosopher, but there was a part of him that could never quite settle with the stereotypical philosophising on the concept of love. Unfortunately for him, he found himself prone to it, and no amount of self-analysis could answer his questions of why. At first he had supposed it was because he had lost so much and been left with so little, but as the years passed and his circumstances changed time and time again, he realised that it was probably just part of his nature, one of those undeniable things that he kept locked up with the rest for no reason other than the fact that it was a truth about himself. Axel’s life rarely gave him time for truths, therefore it was in a way regrettable that what he had said to Magnus in that brief moment in the attic had remained a truth throughout the remainder of his life. It was true when he had been taken, it was true in the intervening years, through the beatings and the changes in location and finally through the changes that made him someone who mattered again. It was true all through Axel’s tireless attempts to track Magnus down, and it had never been more true than when he was sitting across from him in that barn with the exact same lighting as the attic. Such long lasting truths were so rare; Axel held on to it with everything he had, and if Magnus ever worked out what he had said in Bern he never mentioned it. 

“There comes a time in everyone’s life,” Axel said tiredly one day, many many years after the attic, “where having a truth turns into having a regret. Don’t you think, Sir Magnus?”

“Mm,” Magnus said, after a moment – he had been dozing. “Explain.”

Axel got the impression that Magnus had made his mind up already, but nonetheless always appreciated the opportunity to try and convince him otherwise. 

“It’s a responsibility,” he said. “Keeping it a truth, don’t you think? That sometimes, it might be easier to confess the truth while it is still a truth, rather than wait for time and circumstance to turn it into a betrayal, or perhaps turn it into something that could be used against you.”

“But if no one but you knew it was a truth, who has been betrayed?”

“Yourself, of course.”

“And you can betray yourself, yes?”

“Absolutely.”

Magnus looked at him then, for a moment seeming as though he would disagree, and then Axel saw something clear in his face and knew that he understood – that once again the completely different places they existed within had never been clearer. 

“It is a responsibility,” Magnus said, and Axel gave a small smile. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say there’s something you wanted to confess to me.”

“I could say the same,” Axel replied, because it was easier and so much safer than saying _I already did, decades ago, in Bern, don’t you remember_?

Axel was no stranger to the weight of truths. He had carried them all his life; he knew what to expect, though the knowledge was always of little comfort. He had never had much of a confessor, and even if he had he doubted he would have ever wanted to discuss this particular truth (indeed, Magnus was probably as close as anyone had come to one, and how many times had Axel glanced past the subject with him?). The years passed and the weight of it grew; by the time Magnus died, Axel was almost grateful for the opportunity to grieve. Oddly, the main emotion he experienced was relief. Not just for Magnus, of course – it was obvious that suicide would have been his only other option – but for himself as well, because once the dust settled and all of Magnus’s own truths came out Axel knew he was safe. For perhaps the first time in his life, he owned a truth that would never change; that _could_ never change, that was his and his alone with nothing else attached. He loved him. He had loved him from the moment he had met him, and he had loved him every second since. Even if the only way to confess it was by himself, at a private funeral attended only by himself and a bottle of vodka and a loaf of black bread, it was his to confess.

Magnus was not the only person that bullet had set free.


End file.
